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After meeting Gothic characters the Byronic Hero and the Mad Woman, the time has come to visit periods before Romanticism in discovering a popular character known as The Wise Fool. Origin Story: The idea of the Wise Fool is somewhat hard to trace. Unlike some other character types, he does not have a clear…
Angela Pelster is the author of Limber (Sarabande Books, 2014), for which she won the Great Lakes College Association New Writer Award. This book was first described to me as a “collection of essays about trees,” which is like saying Moby Dick is a book about a whale. Trees may serve as a starting point,…
Kenneth Goldsmith, writing professor at the University of Pennsylvania and self-proclaimed “uncreative” poet, came under fire two weeks ago for performing Michael Brown’s autopsy report as a found poem at a conference at Brown University—and, in the aftermath, the incident has caused artists in every genre to ask: is there such a thing as going…
The latest lit dust-up over genre involved Kazuo Ishiguro and Ursula K. Le Guin. In a review of Ishiguro’s new book The Buried Giant, Le Guin took umbrage at some remarks he made to the New York Times. “Will readers follow me into this?” went Ishiguro’s offending comment. “Will they understand what I’m trying to do,…
I admire a story the way I admire a Zippo lighter—perfectly, even simply engineered to do what is required to do, with nothing extra tacked on. I’m thinking of an unadorned lighter here, simple brushed steel, not one with a Harley Davidson logo on the side. Wick, flint, wind guard, lighter fluid, cover, period. It…
I’ve grown to feel that the direct address of second person point-of-view—you—feels like a forced intimacy. There’s an insistence that isn’t necessarily requited, a desperation that meshes perfectly with the plight of the main character of Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s compelling “The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You,” (The Iowa Review 44/3) which details a…
My Salinger Year Joanna Rakoff 272 pages Knopf $25.95 buy: here J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist Thomas Beller 192 Pages Icons Series, New Harvest $20 buy: here As a boy in Manhattan, Thomas Beller frequented the Museum of Natural History, struggled with his Jewish identity and didn’t apply himself in school. Now he’s our,…
If you were on Twitter at all on March 4th, you were probably mildly (if not completely) aware of the public nightmare that was the HBO Access Writing Fellowship application. Full disclosure: I didn’t apply although I know many writers who did. And for those not familiar with the fellowship, it is designed to give up to eight…
![Round-Down: What the [Redacted]? Clean Reader App Cleans Up Literature](https://pshares.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ebook.jpg)
Many parents want to expose their children to great literature but find themselves facing a dilemma—often these books, for their more mature content, contain profanity. It can be a difficult thing to broker, the desire to introduce strong work at a young age with the desire to avoid swears and age-inappropriate content. And now,…
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